Owen Van Natta to Leave Facebook — One of the earliest executives at Facebook, Owen Van Natta (pictured here), will be transitioning out of the social-networking company in the next few weeks. — Van Natta played a key role in important negotiations related to Facebook's early lucrative ad deal …

Introducing The Most Advanced News Site On The Planet — Well, another news aggregator launched today. This one is called Newspond, and while they didn't set a record for baseless hyperbole, they come close. — The site, like TechMeme and Digg, tries to determine breaking and important news …

Is Newspond a Techmeme killer? — Ever wonder what you would get if you crossed Digg with Techmeme and gave the new site a slick Web 2.0 style theme? Yeah, neither did we, but that's a half decent description of Newspond, a news aggregation site that launched today. — Newspond is not a social news site like Digg.

Top ten things to do with your now-defunct HD DVD player — Finally, HD DVD users now have the empirical evidence they've been looking for to prove that the universe really is conspiring against them. We figured we'd make ourselves useful over here and give you a list of things you can do with your poor …

Now AT&T Is Offering An Unlimited Plan For $99 — OK we're not even done with the Verizon flat-rate phone plans news announcement and here comes Ma Bell with its own $99-a-month unlimited offer. … By the way, this unlimited plan is for voice only. No changes on data and SMS pricing, which still cost an arm and a leg.

Microsoft: Bill Gates Comes To Stanford — Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates is giving a talk at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium this afternoon. The talk is called “On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back.” The company has already pre-announced the one official bit of news …

Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes … It's hard to write a general article about application design mistakes because the very worst mistakes are domain-specific and idiosyncratic. Usually, applications fail because they (a) solve the wrong problem, (b) have the wrong features for the right problem …

Two announcements — At lessig08.org, you can watch a 10 minute video explaining the launching of a Change Congress movement, and the decision I am trying to make about whether to run for Congress. That decision will be made soon. I've been spurred to consider it seriously by the enormous support …

HandBrake 0.9.2 Released — A new version of HandBrake - the free, open-source DVD to MPEG converter - is now available. — HandBrake 0.9.2 incorporates many changes, including full support for the AppleTV Take 2 and the latest iPhone/iPod Touch firmware. — Download it now. — Features for Apple fans:

Yahoo outlines golden parachutes for employees — Yahoo laid out its golden parachute plans for all of its full-time employees Tuesday, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing outlines two change-in-control severance plans, should the Internet search pioneer find itself under new ownership, aka Microsoft.

Feedburner - Kickin It Old School — It's always fun to get the monthly Feedburner check for advertising they insert into the RSS feed. The actual dollar amount is still next to nothing, but I love the fact that, even with nearly 800,000 publishers, 1.4 million managed feeds …

Getting Ready for ‘The Endless Season’ — After months of speculation, NBC confirmed on Tuesday that it would sidestep the annual star-studded “upfront” presentation for advertisers and hold a series of client meetings with media buyers instead. — Perhaps more important for television viewers …

EBay Users, Take Note — Evidently Scientologists have enough administrative access to EBay to delete listings that they view as patent infringements, such as the so-called e-meter. (Note, the listing was removed shortly after the screenshot was taken). — How can they do that?

New details on MySpace's music play — MySpace Music is the name News Corp. executives are tentatively using for a proposed music service that they are pitching to record executives, two sources told CNET News.com. — The news that News Corp., MySpace's parent company …